MEDIÆVAL RHODESIA

First edition: xv, 106 pages, frontispiece, numerous black and white photographs and illustrations, diagrams, decorative green cloth titled gilt on the upper cover and spine - which is frayed at the top and the bottom of the spine and is slightly faded, corners bumped, a good copy.

David Randall-MacIver, (born Oct. 31, 1873, London, died April 30, 1945, New York), British-born American archaeologist and anthropologist. Randall-MacIver was educated at the University of Oxford and began his career at the excavation (1899–1901) of Abydos, Egypt, led by Sir Flinders Petrie. After conducting excavations of the Zimbabwe ruins in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Randall-MacIver wrote Medieval Rhodesia (1906), in which he contended that the ruins were not built by an ancient and vanished white civilization as was currently believed but were of purely African origin and that they dated from about the 14th century; his view was borne out by later archaeological study.https://www.britannica.com/biography/David-Randall-MacIver

Mendelssohn (Sidney) South African Bibliography vol.1 page 944: The investigations described in this work were undertaken at the request of the British Association and the Rhodes Trustees, in the year 1905. Mr. Randall-Maciver considered that the result of his explorations disproved the theory respecting the great antiquity of the Zimbabwe Ruins, and showed that they were erected by African natives in the fourteenth century, when Sofala was a flourishing Arab port. The author's researches led him to conclusions directly opposed to those of other investigators, and for that reason he does not refer to other books on the subject, which, he remarks, "it was impossible to praise, and would have been invidious to criticise"; an exception, however, is made in favour of Mr. G. M. Theal's Records of South-Eastern Africa. With regard to this publication it is stated that " apart from the collection of documents embodied in that admirable work, there exists no bibliography with which the student need be troubled."